Museo del Prado

The Museo del Prado, officially the Museo Nacional del Prado, is Spain's main national art museum, located in central Madrid. It houses European art dating from the twelfth century to the early twentieth, built on the former Spanish royal collection, and holds the single finest collection of Spanish art anywhere. Founded as a museum of painting and sculpture in 1819, it also holds important collections of other kinds of work; its holdings of Francisco Goya, its most extensively represented artist, sit alongside major works by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian and Diego Velazquez. Velazquez's own eye, exercised in his own lifetime as a court painter, was also responsible for bringing much of the museum's collection of Italian masters to Spain, now one of the largest such collections outside Italy.